In the United States, as many as 7,000 commercial and private aircraft may be in the air simultaneously at a given time and date, and the total number of commercial flights in a given 24-hour period generally exceeds 50,000. For example, in March 2001, more than 57,000 flights were reported for one 24-hour period. Further, the growth in commercial aircraft traffic has been growing at a rate of between 2 and 7 percent per annum. Faced with a doubling of commercial air traffic in a time interval of between 10 and 35 years, workers in aviation are concerned with implementing air traffic management approaches that can safely and reliably handle air traffic growth over the next several decades.
What is needed is an approach that receives proposed flight plans and associated flight route information and flight parameters for a plurality of aircraft operating in a given region (e.g., the continental United States) and provides actual flight routes and schedules, based upon expected air traffic, and that avoids or minimizes air traffic incidents, by changing one or more flight plan parameters where appropriate, for one or more of these aircraft. Preferably, the system should provide flight route information and parameters for normal flights, for direct-to flights, for emergency responses and for free flight responses to events.